The Three Israeli Teenagers Murdered by Jihadists Are the Children of All of Us

The Israeli military today found the bodies of the three missing teenagers, just over two weeks after they were abducted in the West Bank, allegedly by Hamas militants. The discovery ended an urgent search that led to Israel's largest ground operation in the Palestinian territory in a decade and raised fears of a renewed Israeli-Hamas confrontation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed tough action : "Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay," Netanyahu said in a statement, adding the teenagers "were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by human animals." The three boys - Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, a 16-year-old with dual Israeli-American citizenship - disappeared while hitchhiking home near the West Bank city of Hebron after 10pm on June 12. Despite the dangers, hitchhiking is common among Israelis traveling in and out of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The teens had been studying at Jewish religious seminaries in the West Bank. "The bodies are currently going through forensic identification. The families of the abducted teens have been notified," the army said. Lt. Colonel Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said the bodies were found "under a pile of rocks" near the village of Halhul, just north of Hebron. Binyamin Proper, who was among the civilian volunteers that found the bodies, told Israeli TV that a member of the search party "saw something suspicious on the ground, plants that looked out of place, moved them and moved some rocks and then found the bodies. We realized it was them and we called the army." The disappearance of the three teenagers had sparked a frantic manhunt throughout the West Bank, including the arrest of nearly 400 Hamas operatives. Last week, the Israeli security service named two Palestinian suspects in the abductions - Marwan Kawasma and Amer Abu Aysha - who are described as well-known operatives in the Islamist militant group Hamas. The two men remained on the run late Monday. The search for the three boys captured the attention of everyone in Israel. Israelis held daily prayer vigils, including mass gatherings attended by tens of thousands of people at the Western Wall, the holiest prayer site in Judaism, and in a downtown square in Tel Aviv. The boys' mothers appeared on TV often, asking for the release of their sons. News of their deaths caused a spontaneous outpouring of grief in Israel. Friends and neighbors rushed to the homes of the families in the Israeli towns of Nof Ayalon and Elad, and the West Bank settlement Talmon, while supporters lit memorial candles. "All of Israel bows its head today," said President Shimon Peres. ~~~~~ Prime Minister Netanyahu was huddling with his Security Cabinet, a group of senior government ministers, late Monday debating a response. But, AP reports that Israel's options may be somewhat limited. The two-week crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank means that few major targets remain. Hamas was already weakened by seven years of pressure by Israel and the forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli forces seemed to find very little during the latest crackdown. So Israel may focus on the Gaza Strip. Israel has been battling a wave of rocket fire from Gaza that erupted in response to its West Bank operation. There have been almost daily Hamas rocket attacks, followed by Israeli reprisals. Israel has not shown publicly its evidence that Hamas was responsible for the kidnappings or that the kidnappers received orders from higher-ups, rather than acting on their own. And Hamas, while it has praised the kidnappings, has never claimed responsibility. Today in Gaza, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri warned Israel against undertaking a broad offensive. Gaza militants possess thousands of rockets and would almost certainly unleash heavy barrages at Israel if Israel attacks. "Netanyahu should know that threats don't scare Hamas, and if he wages a war on Gaza, the gates of hell will open on him," Zuhri said. In Washington, President Obama said : "As a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing. The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms senseless acts of terror against innocent youth." Naftali Bennett, the conservative Israeli minister of finance and a supporter of building Israel settlements, told the Israeli media : "There is no mercy for the murderers of children. This is the time for action not words," And Yuli Edelstein, speaker of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, said : "It's time for Israel to wage an unrelenting war against terror in general and against Hamas in particular." Mark Regev, Netanyahu's spokesman, said Israel would step up its calls for Abbas to dissolve the unity government he recently formed with the backing of Hamas. Abbas has said he will not do this, although he has condemned the kidnappings and helped Israel in its search for the boys. ~~~~~ Dear readers, in a moment when the world pauses to consider the death of three innocent Israeli teenagers who were simply returning home after religious studies, we first turn to their families, and especially their mothers who were shown on European TV several times, asking for the return of their sons with a quiet dignity that belied the anguish and resignation in their eyes. Then, we reach out to Israel, once again victimized by an unrelenting faceless terror that lives next door to them. But, then, as reasoning human beings, we ask why these deaths are so painful - they are the latest, but surely not the last, and they join the hundreds of thousands of Middle East Jews and Moslems slaughtered by jihadist terrorists and the governments that support them. We must surely today recall the bloodstained bodies of Syrian infants and the faces of the young Nigerian Christian schoolgirls staring out of enforced, unwanted veils put there by Boko Haram. We remember the lifeless bodies of mothers trying to cover their children to keep them alive in the chemical attacks of Saddam Hussein in southern Iraq. Why? Why do terrorists and tyrants - for they are the same, only their methods differ - feel compelled to sow hatred, to brutally kill those, even children, whose crime is to be sunni...or shiite...or Christian...or Jewish? And why is it these three Jewish schoolboys who make us stop in our tracks? Because they have faces and names and mothers -- we saw them..we heard them...we knew in the deep recesses of our souls that they were walking in the valley of the shadow of death. And they are Jewish...peace-loving reasonable, beleaguered believers in the holiness of life and the brotherhood of man - whose children are always at risk in a part of the world where peace and brotherhood are condemned to the killing fields. The next time a Western politician tries to tell you that these murdering jihadist terrorists can be reasoned with or contained or treated as if they had normal human feelings or souls -- remember Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16. They are murdered Israeli schoolboys. They are also the faces of all our children who will also be slaughtered if we do not find the will to defeat the evil that is stalking us.